Posts Tagged ‘should not be a map

I sometimes feel bad about this, but I’m going to let a map I just received today jump to the front of the queue, as it was in the right place at the right time. This one comes from my colleague Tim Wallace, who was sitting next to me filling out a health insurance form.

It may surprise those of you who are not from the area to learn that Dane County, Wisconsin, does not look very much like that. The rigid lines of the Public Land Survey System, combined with the Wisconsin River, have left us with something that looks more like this:

Taken from Wikipedia article on Dane County.

Now, that being said, the fact that this map has a very high level of generalization is not inherently problematic. There are lots of very generalized, even cartoonish maps out there. It depends on the purpose and audience of your map, and sometimes fine details are not important. But I think they significantly overdid it here. It looks rather comic, and this clashes with the professional application (a healthcare provider directory) to which it’s being put. It seems haphazard and only loosely related to reality, and that makes me doubt the rest of the information that goes in to it.

The real lesson from today’s map, which applies to a lot of maps out there, is that it should not have been made. It conveys no useful spatial information. I can’t use it to figure out how to get to any of the UW clinics, and while I can sort of tell where clinics are in relation to each other (the heavy generalization makes that an estimate at best), that’s not really useful information unless you choose your health clinic based on its proximity to other clinics or cities. “I’m sorry, the village of McFarland has asked that I stay at least 10 miles away at all times, so I’ll need a clinic an appropriate distance away.” So, barring bizarre circumstances, I cannot tell how having a map is better than having a table of clinic locations. A table would, in fact, be significantly more useful, because you could use the clinic address to actually figure out how to get there. Not everything that has a location needs to be mapped, or can be usefully mapped.

Also, if you compare the two maps above, you will notice that the city dots for the clinic map don’t really bear a lot of resemblance to where those communities actually are in Dane county. And, in case you’re wondering, I spot checked this against the addresses for the clinics in Belleville and Verona, and it still did not match. The dots have only the loosest connection to reality. If geography really means so little here, why make a map? Again, a table would be better. The only reason the author of today’s map can get away with this level of generalization and haphazard dot placement is because the map is scarcely conveying any geographic information.

The labeling could be better, though it’s not horrible. It needs more consistency in how far the label is positioned relative to the dot. Look at Cross Plains vs. Waunakee. Why not put them both directly under the dot center, if that’s what you’re going for? And this is not to mention the lack of corner positions. It is conventional, and, as I have often been taught, rather easier to read, if you put the label in a corner position — that is, up and to the right of the dot, or down and to the left, etc. Fitchburg is also ambiguously placed — the label is about the same distance from two different dots. Would have been just fine if it were off to the left of the dot. Now, to be fair, not all labeling can be ideal, because geographic realities get in the way. But, the author of this map does not appear to have been strongly tied to geographic reality anyway, so I’m not sure if that’s an excuse in this case.

This map does not need a legend. A good map title should tell you what the map is about; since this map is about only one thing, if it’s well-titled I should be able to figure out what the red dots mean. If I’m looking at a map that’s titled “2009 UW Health Clinic Locations,” I’m not going to mistake those red dots for bowling alleys. Or cheese factories. Also, the dot in the legend is not only larger than the dots on the map, but a different shape. The ones on the map are more elliptical.

I was a little confused about the statement in the legend that says the communities of Black Earth and Cambridge are excluded — both are in Dane county. Skimming the report a bit, I think it’s because they’re not part of the UW Health Network. In which case, of course they wouldn’t be on the map — why would they bother to mention that? Chicago is also not included on this map, but they forgot to mention that one. On the other hand, if they are in the network, I have no idea why they would be left off. Maybe the author is no longer allowed to make maps of Black Earth.

In the end, this looks to me to be a classic case of “a table is too boring, let’s make a map!” But a table would have been a lot more useful for people who actually want to find a doctor.

One Nice Thing: The author set the county label in a different type than the city labels, strongly distinguishing them from each other.

Good day, gentle readers. I am lately returned from a couple of trips to lands outside of Wisconsin. NACIS was wonderful, and it was great to meet many of you in Sacramento. While there, I learned that Tom Patterson, creator of the Kenai Fjords map which I praised in my last post, was slightly disappointed that I did not point out anything negative about his work. Looking it over again, I will say that, for the elevation marker points on his map (mountain tops and sea valleys), the labels positioning could be more consistent.

I’m really nitpicky. My students love it. At least, that’s how I interpret their annoyed stares.

The subject of today’s post is once again one of my own works. This is in response to a conversation with my adviser, Mark Harrower, who pointed out that most any map, from the best to the worst, could be improved by some critique. I have previously featured one of my worst maps on here — Mark challenged me to instead show him one of my best, and then post his comments on it. So I picked my favorite, a map about the tallest buildings in Europe during the last 125+ years:

Rising Skyline, by Daniel Huffman

Rising Skyline detail

Legend

Here’s what Mark had to say (and he warns that some of these are nitpicky — his students, too, love it):

He’s quite right – I’m always embarrassed by this sort of thing, forgetting to design for people with abnormal color vision. Actually, I’m surprised that it was Hospital (pink) and Museum (grey) that got him. I would have figured on Religious (red) and Residential (green), but I suppose those two colors are distinct enough in lightness that they’re still separable.

“I don’t like that you have both vertical and horizontal timelines, it requires too much work to get this, and the vertical timeline took some time for me to understand in part because going down is more recent. Physical geographers/geologists like their vertical timelines too, but I think they arrange them with newest at top? Nonetheless, for most users I suspect a left-to-right timeline would be more graspable (oldest on left).”

When I started putting this map together, one of the people I showed it to didn’t like the “empty” spaces along the left and bottom of the map. I responded by adding in these timelines. This is probably one of the worst justifications you can give for adding something to a map: “I needed to fill space.” The vertical timeline was vertical because I needed to cover a vertical space. I think the data are interesting, to be sure, and related to the subject of the map, but it could do without such a timeline. Or a much smaller one. I did a redesign of this map recently for inclusion in a textbook. I had to shrink it from its normal size of 24″ x 18″ to about 6″ across, so I had to cut out the graphs. I think it looked better, less cluttered, with the graphs gone. Empty space is nothing to fear. Sometimes it’s a problem, but I think I went overboard in trying to fill it with graphs and little annotation boxes.

“The data are interesting but I’m not convinced they need to be mapped. Is there a spatial pattern to see here, beyond the obvious one that big cities tend to have more tall buildings? Does the spatial arrangement of these cities tell us something about the data we couldn’t learn from a table? Is space causal?”

I go back and forth on this one — I think there’s possibly something spatial going on. There’s a Communist East vs. Capitalist West story throughout part of the data, though that connection is not as clear as it would be if I mapped another data set along with it, showing something economic (which would, likewise, have to have a symbol that can convey 125+ years of data). Many times a phenomenon is not driven by where on the Earth’s surface it is, but by the fact that it happens to share a location with another phenomenon. I didn’t make that as clear as I could have (I’ve got some annotation going on which helps). I think there’s also a story of spatial concentration going on here – big buildings becoming something that only big cities have, whereas many small towns had impressive structures prior to the 1950s. But, again, I don’t include a data set that really emphasizes the population differences between places.

“I would like to increase opacity behind the timelines so they don’t need to compete so much with the underlying (and irrelevant) basemap in the corners. The actual data (the lines) are easily upstaged by the basemap and fade effects.”

He’s quite right about that, in my opinion. The lines in the graphs would be easier to follow and focus on if Europe wasn’t going on behind them. Of course, I suspect that if I made the opacity higher, the graphs would start standing out too much — they’re already distracting from the main map. Another good reason to ditch them.

“I don’t know the names of any of the buildings – maybe you could label the lines (at least with some of the famous landmarks?). Without names of buildings, there is nothing to anchor my understanding to (e.g., I know the Eiffel Tower, etc.) – they’re just name-less lines around circles.”

People are probably going to be looking at this map for things that they know. Fun fact: the Eiffel Tower isn’t included here, because it didn’t fit my definition of “building” (which was a tricky thing to nail down). It’s a minor touch, but one that could give people a lot better connection to the data on this map.

One final issue that I have been thinking about lately with this project: it’s pretty complex. Look at that legend — reader education is definitely necessary before engaging with the map. It’s difficult to strike a balance between the transparency of the interface (how easily you get the data off the map) and the depth of the data. I wanted to design this as something you can stick on your wall — I wanted to give it enough substance and complexity that it’s worth examining at some length. Whether or not I have achieved that balance is something I can’t really answer, though.

Before I leave off, I wanted to point out just how much this map was affected by critique earlier down the line in the design process. Here’s what it looked like when I thought I was done:

I showed this to my boss, Tanya Buckingham, here at the UW Cartography Lab, to ask for her advice, as I was planning on entering this into some competitions. Looking back over the comments she made, I notice that she also suggested ditching the vertical timeline and combining it with the horizontal one. She also suggested getting rid of the really big coastal glow and making it more subtle, which advice I took. Drop shadows, glows, etc. should probably not scream “LOOK AT ME I DID SOMETHING FANCY!” The darker color scheme was also as a result of her urging. Both the scheme she suggested, and the one I eventually went with, do a better job of pulling the city dots out from the background and bringing the data to the front of the map.

Writing this up gives me the urge to go back and try and improve it the map, but the process is never done, I suppose. There just comes a time when you must decide it’s good enough.